Clock Ticking on Missouri's Inspired Stay

GLENDALE, Ariz. -- Marcus Denmon already had his one shining moment, that freeze-frame picture to keep for a lifetime, long after the highlights of this NCAA tournament fade.

The Missouri freshman snagged an inbounds pass Thursday night, sidestepped to avoid a hand waving in his face, and let history fly. From three-quarters out, with the halftime buzzer about to blare, Denmon's fling dropped flawlessly through the twine to put his team up by 13, and from that second on Mizzou knew it had been touched by something special, something only a handful of teams get to experience as March rushes to a close.

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But how long will the magic last? Until Hasheem Thabeet rises from deep in the paint and crushes a Missouri shot attempt like an SUV smashing into a bug? Until the University of Connecticut smartly refuses to go where Memphis went and refrains from getting lured into Missouri's crazed, wicked-paced tempo?

Practical intuition says Mizzou's blessed run expires at the hands of UConn in Saturday's West Regional Elite Eight game, the winner earning a trip to the Final Four in Detroit. Lightning rarely strikes twice, and though Denmon's incredible basket launched a striking chain of events against Memphis -- Mizzou's eye-widening 102 points against one of the nation's stingiest defenses, John Calipari's inability to coach his team out of such a deep hole -- UConn is a whole other nightmare.

The top-seeded Huskies haven't many flaws. They are battle-tested survivors of the Big East, a conference that chews and spits out plenty of good teams, and seem to have grown stronger despite a recruiting scandal that continues to produce new, more worrisome allegations every day. It's highly unlikely the Huskies will be spotted leaning over and clutching the hems of their shorts, begging for whistle breaks to slow Missouri's press and fast-breaks and re-branded version of "40 Minutes in Hell."

Memphis never caught its breath against Mizzou, losing 102-91, in Thursday's semifinal, and on Friday the Missouri players, looking as if they'd race to the top of South Mountain if it would make coach Mike Anderson happy, talked in tag-team staccato about the challenge that lay before them, and how they planned to attack it.

It, of course, is the Beast, the 7-3 Thabeet who blocks and scores and snags rebounds and generally makes opponents regret entering his airspace. The Tigers mentioned they've ridden big men before, monsters like Blake Griffin and Cole Aldrich in the Big 12. Ideally, Missouri's maniacal press could keep the ball from flowing to Thabeet on one end of the court, while guards Zaire Taylor and J.T. Tiller dare to drive through the lane at the other end. But "ideally" hardly ever works as planned.

"Personally, I love challenges," Taylor said with a laugh. "Seven foot, I think that makes the lane a little more enticing. But I don't know. He is 7-3. Blocks shots. He is one of the Players of the Year from the Big East for a reason. It will be fun. I think it makes it that much more fun personally."

Tiller smiled bright and admitted, "It is just the layups that might be a little tougher. It means Zaire is going to attack like we normally do but it might be a lot of driving and kicking to get our other teammates open for us tomorrow."

Calipari, Memphis coach, spent so much time pushing the idea that his team had been robbed of a top seed, he seemed to have been caught off guard at Missouri's depth and speed. "We kind of got punched in the mouth right from the beginning of the game," Calipari said.

Jim Calhoun, UConn coach, has had a few diversions of his own over the past week, but promises the Huskies are acutely aware of the pace the Tigers set from the first tip-off. Missouri, said Calhoun, "advertise it as the 40 fastest minutes in basketball, and I'm a believer. Usually I don't like slogans, but that one is true and we really are facing an opponent that we are going to have to walk a very delicate balance with. Memphis wanted to run with them purely for 40 minutes and that is not Connecticut's desire to run 40 minutes with Missouri."

The Huskies' largest hurdle might be in ignoring the urge to prove they can run with the best. An athlete's ego can't always be corralled. But Craig Austrie and A.J. Price, heart and soul of UConn, promise to heed Calhoun's advice and stifle the urge to compete with Missouri in full-court sprints.

"We love playing fast, but we saw what happened to Memphis. They really fell into the trap of playing too fast. With A.J. and myself, we have the ability to kind of control the game and see what's going on out there, play with poise. So we feel like we are going to have to do that tomorrow," Austrie said.

"You definitely don't want to get caught up with that type of game with this team. We like to play fast, but we don't want to play as fast as I think they want to play. That's kind of a different situation for us because we usually want to play faster than most teams. But this team wants to go up and down all game long," Price said. "For us to do that I don't think would be smart."

It was exhausting just listening to the two teams talk about going full-throttle for 40 minutes. And of course, the conversation had to take a detour down the dark side of college sports, as Calhoun was asked to explain what he meant when he told two reporters after the Huskies' semifinal win over Purdue Thursday night that "someone could've made a mistake" during the recruitment of former Huskies guard Nate Miles. The burgeoning scandal has clearly hit Calhoun hard, and could lead this proud, honorable man to retire once the Huskies' romp through the tournament finally ends. Calhoun, his words dripping with sadness, told a story about traveling with Dean Smith a few years ago. "I asked him very simply, 'Coach, why did you get out?' He said, 'I got out at 67 years of age.' I will turn 67 in May, by the way," Calhoun said. Smith told Calhoun he never stopped loving being a coach; it was the stuff on the periphery of the game that led to his retirement.

Calhoun's torment comes in the form of allegations, first reported by Yahoo! Sports, of recruiting wrongdoings. The claims are broad -- add to the list reports of former UConn student manager turned sports agent Josh Nochimson paying several thousand dollars for Miles to have surgery -- but Calhoun, for the moment, has narrowed his role to perhaps not diligently reading the NCAA rule book.

"My quote was, 'in a 508-page manual, a mistake could have been made.' Do I know if any has been made? No, I'm not making judgment one way or the other. I said there could have been a mistake made," Calhoun said. "I have done this for 37 years. I truly believe that everything I have tried to do I have done with a good, clean conscious and if we made a mistake, we'll find out about it. If we didn't, we will also find out about that."

Anderson, coach down the hall, had to navigate a sticky situation of his own last season after a group of Missouri players were arrested following a fight in a local nightclub. Anderson suspended the "Athena Five," got criticized by some for being too soft on discipline and ripped by others for coming down too hard. The Tigers fell out of Big 12 contention but Anderson never stopped repeating to his players the line he first uttered three years ago, when he traded a fine program he built at the University of Alabama at Birmingham for a chance to do the same at Mizzou.

"When he first got there," recalled senior forward Leo Lyons, "we had a meeting in the locker room and the first thing he said was, 'we are playing for a national championship.' Everybody probably didn't believe it at that point, but all the hard work we put in, we slowly but surely became winners."

Missouri got its shining moment, and proved "40 fastest minutes in basketball" is more than just a slogan. Floating over or through the Beast from the Big East could be where the magic trail ends.